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Irking Siobhan O’Flynn

Siobhan O’Flynn

To:

Scott Ellington

oh buddy – can’t see the forest for the tree huh? how silly – is this performance art??? must be

On Feb 20, 2011, at 10:27 AM, Scott Ellington wrote:

Siobhan,

No. It’s a photograph of my eye. I’m telling you there are absolutely NO other body parts nor other people involved in the icon that creeps you out, and any associations you make with defective schools of art are purely your projection. On the other hand, it’s a polarizing image to which some people react as you do (probably without informing me of their ennui/disgust/whatever) and other people say they like:

Caption: If the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had a kid, it would probably come into the world with an attitude like this.
Scatalogical allusions are unavoidable, hence the content warning.

OH MAN IS THIS COOL LOOKING!!!!!!
LOL!!! LOL!!
INSTANT FAVE HERE!
Maybe to make this a screen saver on my computer. Strangely enough,… scatology is not the first thing I allude to or is on my mind with this image.
More like… “Even with sex were “fucked over” by being watched/ controlled by THEM…-from our own insides.”
Ponder that, My Peoples.

An interesting question, and very like my response to the representative of one of the founders of United Hollywood who asked me to replace it as my avatar there.
Apart from the assertion that this image was objectionable because of its urogenital associations, no elaboration was provided, and I complied with their request, motivated by my respect for very smart and very creative people.

It’s just the eye of the beholder on which and with which the viewer projects associations. Those associations are as valid as the artist’s original intent — which was to see what a photograph of my eye would look like mirrored. It actually was slightly more interesting than the original photograph (and that’s not saying much), but the response to the image is fairly fascinating. The instant it’s shared, the image also becomes yours to like/dislike for reasons beyond my control — but it’s still just an origami eye/lid/socket, folded in half and mirrored in Photoshop — and mirroring the culture that interprets it’s significance as they see it collectively and individually. I don’t own the associations people make any more than I have control of the way people see me.To be known as the PudendaEye guy is not a shameful thing, regardless of the derivation of the word, “pudenda”. Trite, shocking, old-hat..? Wow! It’s a cheap, digital photograph of my eye that I manipulated in the simplest possible way. The persistence and vehemence of your (and other people’s) response to it is disproportionately interesting to the effort invested in creating it, so my response to those responses probably seems quite ornery. Sobeit. The truth is — it’s a slightly manipulated photograph of my eye. Handle it. Or don’t, but asking me to stop using it as my avatar is a vastly inferior alternative to our having a conversation about it’s putative significance as an indicator of the health of our common culture. (Which isn’t post-racist, post-pornographic, making-much-progress…) So, thanks for this opportunity. Scott

Hey Scott,

that’s a packed email below with many tangents that I can’t rely speak to on the writers’ strike, so I reply to the point I can, re your avatar.

Here’s the basis of my response, the degree of which you find fascinating:

To be concise as your description is disingenuous, it’s your eye in a vagina – so is that supposed to be subversive? avant garde? rejecting the constraints of normative society? if so, it’s been done but maybe an audience without a sense of art history won’t know that.

And, as I mentioned before the clearest antecedent, the Surrealists, were almost all misogynist in their fragmentation of the female body – See Hans Bellmer’s disturbing dolls. So whatever rejection of the morals of the day, consistently, the shock value of their images was generated by images that continued the tradition of misogyny and objectification that underlie the western tradition of the nude. The only surrealist who really broke with the past in creating a radically new iconography was Magritte. And I should add, Lee Miller, Man Ray’s sometime model, and a photographer in her own right who did a radically subversive photo series of a real breast on a plate, having stolen the post-masectomy breast from a hospital. That is one radical critique of the tradition of the nude, the objectification of women and the medical profession all in one.

so I don’t really see the traction in your avatar as a subversive political statement, as it’s one in a long history of images that support a status quo that I don’t support. And artistically? aesthetically? as such it’s kinda boring because it’s been so done. And do you really want to be ‘the vagina eye guy’? You’re a film guy, you must know all the crit around the dynamics of the gaze etc etc

saying it as I see it

Siobhan

On Feb 19, 2011, at 09:58 PM, Scott Ellington wrote:

Bill Moyers spoke at length last month to broadcasters in NYC. One of the jewels among his remarks was this one:

The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy.

Sidebar. The same guy who turned me on to his copy of the Serenity DVD four years ago, that put me on the path to Joss Whedon, Ken Burns, David Milch, David Thorburn, Henry Jenkins and to you

suggested yesterday that Kyle XY was really cool. So I’ve been streaming it for the past 10 hours, and Kyle XY absolutely sucks. Bob’s taste is clearly deplorable and his tip to SereniFly was a total fluke.

Like this:

Related

“Caption: If the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had a kid, it would probably come into the world with an attitude like this.
Scatalogical allusions are unavoidable, hence the content warning.”

using the right terms? don’t think the concept works here:

sca·tol·o·gy (sk-tl-j)
n.
1. The study and analysis of feces for physiological and diagnostic purposes. Also called coprology.
2. An obsession with excrement or excretory functions.
3. The psychiatric study of such an obsession.